Chickens, Natalie Prosin ’07 MPP vividly remembers, were the subject of
her first-grade science project. After watching several chicks hatch
and open their eyes, Prosin overheard her mother, who had come to pick
her up from school, ask the teacher what would happen to the chickens
next. The teacher implied that they would soon be someone’s dinner. “It
was like, ‘Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, they’re going to be on our table
next week,’” Prosin says.

Courtesy Tatiana Mendez

It was an early lesson in the harsh reality animals face,
and it has stayed with Prosin her whole life. Now the executive
director of the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) in Washington, D.C., she
is part of a coalition of lawyers and scientists working to expand the
rights of elephants, great apes, and cetaceans (such as whales and
dolphins).

But they’re starting with chimpanzees. In suits filed in three New York
county courts in December, the NhRP argues that chimps should enjoy
some of the same basic rights as humans. The animals wouldn’t be
allowed to vote of course, but instead would possess the status of
“personhood,” which ascribes an entity some measure of rights and
duties, in this case the right to bodily liberty.

At Brown, Prosin earned a master’s in public policy, focusing, she
says, on “how to apply the theoretical in a practical way.” Her class
on environmental policy and practice, taught by senior lecturer
Caroline Karp, was her first introduction to the role the law and
courts play in bringing about social change.

“We actually used a law school textbook,” Prosin says. “That opened my
eyes to the possibility of solving very complex problems through the
legal process.” By then Prosin had a pretty clear idea of where her
passion lay. She remembers introducing herself to a graduate-level
course by saying, “I’m Natalie Prosin, and I love animals.” After
graduating, Prosin earned a law degree at Boston College.

Prosin was first introduced to the animal rights legal movement when
she met NhRP president Steven Wise, who was preparing a flurry of
targeted lawsuits seeking new rights for animals. This appealed to
Prosin’s putting “theory into practice” perspective. The decision to
start with chimpanzees was due to the animals’ autonomy,
self-consciousness, and, says Prosin, “a host of other qualities that
judges in the past have found sufficient to give legal rights to other
beings.”

The December lawsuits soon failed in the lower courts, as the team
expected, so now all three cases (involving a total of four “captive”
New York–based chimpanzees) will head to the New York Appellate Courts.
The case will most likely wind up with the Court of Appeals. If any of
the cases wins, the chimpanzee will be freed and transferred to one of
the refuges in the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance.

The crux of the legal approach, beyond giving nonhuman animals
fundamental legal rights, is habeas corpus. Essentially habeas corpus
entitles a third party who believes someone is being held illegally to
a court hearing on behalf of the captive. In its court case, NhRP
claims that its chosen chimpanzees are being held illegally and should
be released.

Prosin will soon be featured in a documentary about the NhRP filmed by
the husband and wife team of documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris
Hegedus. The pair is known for 1993’s The War Room,
about Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and Pennebaker won a
Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2012 for developing the cinema verité
approach.